THE NEW YORKER from robbing the library, in fact, I had unwittingly done a salutary job of scav- enging. Somewhere over the past quar- ter century, the juice of the novel had calcified, or my nature had so coarsened that it derived very little moxie from the tale of an English girl's enslavement by a sinister Indian sect. Nevertheless, klep- tomaniac and boor though I had be- come, I still had enough decency not to fling it aside with a snap judgment. Lighting up a Murad to induce nostal- gia, and greasing my face with butter to protect it from the burning prose, I wallowed in to the text like a Channel swimmer leaving Cape Gris-Nez. T HE heroine of "Leonie of the Jun- gle" makes her curtsy to us at the age of seven in a locale largely unex- plored in the fiction of the budding twenties-a psychoanalyst's office. An orphan afflicted with somnambulism and malevolent dreams, she has been brought to a Harley Street specialist named Sir Jonathan Cuxson by her aunt, Lady Susan Hetth. Leonie is a veritable dewdrop of a child, with opal- escent, gold-flecked eyes and a lisp that would melt the glue out of a revolving bookcase. The mention of a possible jog on a pony, for Instance, precipitates the following: " 'I can't wide astwide,' she sighed. 'I haven't any bweeches. . . . But I can swim, an' jump in out of my depff. I learnt in the baff at the seaside! ' " In- quiries by Sir Jonathan establish that an Indian nurse gained a strong ascendancy over Leonie during her babyhood In In- dia and may even have endowed her with strange psychic potency. The latter supposition is confirmed at the Zoo, to which she is taken by J an, the Doctor's son; she handles a ravening Bengal tiger at will, doubtless anesthetizing the beast with her dialogue "'Poor tiger!' she . ' I ' f was saYIng. m vewwy sowwy or I , , you- m sure you re not so vewy, vewy wicked, an' if you will bend your head, I will stwoke you behind the ear same as I did Kittv.' " Thanks to a chicken- hearted social system that forbids euthanasia for people who talk this way, LeonIe is permitted to grow up and go to boarding school, where she practIces sleepwalking almost as intensively as her colleagues do field hockey. In conse- quence, she is considered rather odd, an estimate that has some physical justifica- tion also, for the author says of her hands that "the fing-ers were like pea-pods, long and slender and slightly dimpled." You could hardly expect anybody, let alone a group of teen-age girls, to warm up to an ambulatory mess of greens drifting around in the moonlight and --'--- . - 29 (ID \.../ Jv I CCWe have such complete confidence in our product that we're not even ofJertng a money-back guarantee " . chanting, "1 make oblation. . . let the gods come well willing!" It's vewwy unnervIng, reawwy. Her schooling finished, Leonie set- tles down on the north Devon coast with her aunt and there is forced into wed- ding Sir Walter Hickle, a loathsome, baseborn blackmailer who has been prey- ing on Lady Susan. The union is partic- ularly odious because, before it takes place, Leonie has met J an Cuxson again and fallen in love with him. J an, now a physician carrying on his father's work, chances to spy her during a somnambu- listic seizure in which she executes a voluptuous belly dance invoking Kali, the Indian goddess of death. He tries to convince her that she IS not daffy, as the evidence would indicate, but simply the victim of long-range mesmerism from India, interlarding the diagnosis with fevensh busses and appeals to marry him instead of Sir Walter. That Leonie should mulishly reject his suit when it is open and shut that they are unavoid- ably headed for the same ostermoor seems a shade qUIxotic. Still, Miss Con- quest has two hundred pages of Oriental monkeyshInes to vend, and no paren- thetical smooching is going to upset her applecart. The marriage, therefore, takes place on schedule; J an, unrecon- ciled, departs for India to track down Leonie's incubus-presumably by ad- vertising in the incubus column of the Bombay Daily Mail-and en route re- ceIves the cheery news that SIr Walter . has perished in a fire on his wedding night. This deft bit of author's conven- ience effectively preserves the heroine's virginity for the second half of the book, when it will be called upon to weather truly hideous ordeals, and now the real fireworks begin. T HE Svengali actually responsible for Leonie's trauma, it appears, is a prince's son named Madhü Krishna- ghar, who by sorcery and incantation has been striving to lure her back to the Peninsula to serve as his plaything and as priestess to Kali. His fiendish magic prevails. A few weeks later, we join the bewitched maiden aboard a lIner steam- ing up the Hooghly, sleepwalking thir- teen to the dozen. Madhü, a charm boy resembling Ramon Novarro at his prime, has sneaked on at Colombo, and here is the vision he sees as she trips out on deck in her nightgown: "She made an arresting picture as she stood listen- ing intently, her flimsy garment falling away from her shoulders, leaving the slender white back bare to the waist, while she held handfuls of the trans- parent stuff crushed against her breast, upon which lay a jewel hung from a gold chain. . . . Sweetly she laughed up into his face as she laid one little hand upon the great white cloak which swung from his shoulders, unaware that in moving her hand her own garment had slipped, and that her beauty lay exposed like a lotus bud before hIs eyes. She came